New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | November 1, 2005

Charles Murray remembers the late individualist feminist author Joan Kennedy Taylor.

Comments

Justin Raimondo|11.1.05 @ 8:38PM|#

Thanks for posting this.

|11.2.05 @ 10:07AM|#

I can't believe you run Charles "Bell Curve" Murray pieces.

|11.2.05 @ 11:23AM|#

Have you read The Bell Curve or are you just parrotting PC talking points?

|11.2.05 @ 11:49AM|#

I know you're supposed to square your standard deviations.

Murray knows that, too.

|11.2.05 @ 12:47PM|#

The assertion that there are intelligence differences due to race that was only a part of the overall book the "Bell Curve" has been statistically shown to be false (at least the way that it was asserted in the Bell Curve was statistically flawed), but other than that, it's overall a pretty interesting book.

|11.2.05 @ 4:26PM|#

Joan Kennedy Taylor was one of "my" authors back in the day when I acquired and edited new work for Prometheus Books, Inc. Late in my tenure there, we published Joan's wonderful book Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Reconsidered. Joan passed away in New York City last week. Joan and I talked in person just twice, once in Buffalo as we were readying her book for publication, and then a couple years later at Stanford University, where I was teaching.

I liked her: She was serious, she was clear, she would no more waste your time than she would let you waste hers, and she had the smile of someone who had smoked a lot of cigarettes. In an appreciation -- http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/riggenbach2.html -- Jeff Riggenbach (another Prometheus author, one rather less serious about deadlines than Taylor was) presents Taylor as the leading woman libertarian intellectual in the United States after Ayn Rand. Riggenbach's article depicts a terrifically engaged life. My favourite anectdote:

"During the five years Joan spent between husbands, 1953�1958, she was not without male companionship. Her parents� many contacts in the literary world and her own close relations with Columbia University (the campus across the street from her own alma mater, the campus where she had met her first husband, the father of her child) brought her into contact with several of the most famous of the Beat Generation writers just before and just after they had made their first big splash as literary figures. She dated novelist Jack Kerouac a few times during the summer of 1957 and is said to have stayed up all night with him on the eve of the publication of On the Road, waiting for the first reviews. She told me on one occasion about a double date she had gone on with Kerouac and his friend Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, she said, was trying to become heterosexual on the advice of his psychiatrist. He later made advances to her, she said, asking her to initiate him into heterosexual sex. She declined."

|11.2.05 @ 6:05PM|#

Isn't the standard deviation the square root of the variance? And if so, why bother to square it, when you could just not take the square root of the variance in the first place?

Admittedly, my stats background ain't what it should be. I'm really just asking.